One thing you can say about the waste- based economy as it exits the world’s stage is that it does so with a certain swagger.

The National Football League is shut down for the foreseeable future. Can the US government be far behind? What’s more important to national security?

Greek and Irish debt instruments are priced @ default levels. Spain and Portugal are poised at the edge of the debt void. Italy’s investment relationship with Libya looks increasingly faulty for both parties. The waves of uncertainty in the Eurozone reflects stress on credit market mechanisms resulting from competition for capital. This competition takes place between governments, oil dependent businesses, banks and motorists. This is EU’s all- out war between cars and their human slaves. Right now the cars are winning.

In Libya, the war between people intensifies. The revolt of the putative Middle- East’s middle class is elsewhere on ‘pause’. The propellant for unrest — a Hollywood- way of life that is vanishing fast and must be grasped for — is intensifying.

The events in Japan drive a stake through the heart of the idea that the world’s economic dependency on consumer waste can be retreived by adding more nuclear reactors.

Right now there are an undetermined number of reactors on the ropes with one already subject to an explosion. You can come to your own conclusions about the severity of this current crisis. Several things are clear:

• The establishment soft- pedals the event and its consequences.
• The three reactors at one site and two at another are not going to be put back into service any time soon, if ever.
• The money costs associated with these five reactors have no practical upper limit. The reactor crisis is @ the beginning. One reactor has already experienced core melting. How about all of them?

Here is what the New York Times says about the situation:

Heat from the nuclear fuel rods must be removed by water in a cooling system, but that requires power to run the pumps, align the valves in the pipes and run the instruments. The plant requires a continuous supply of electricity even after the reactor stops generating power.

Reactors do useful work the same way other steam boilers do, by exploiting or ‘arbitraging’ the heat differential between the reactor core and a heat sink or condenser. The Japanese reactors at issue are boiling- water reactors. This means the sink is a heat exchanger in line with the generator turbine and the reactor core. Heat flows from the reactor in the form of superheated steam, though generator turbines to a series of heat exchangers. The last of these is immersed in cold sea water. The heat exchangers cool the steam to water which is pumped back into the reactor.

Work results from energy flowing from the core through the turbine to the condenser. Here is a schematic of the Japanese- style reactor from World Nuclear News:

Slightly radioactive water is cycled through the turbine and the condenser, all of which are located within the reactor containment buildings. This is the structure that was damaged in this morning’s explosion. The Establishment without saying so directly implies that the sheet- metal shed surrounding the containment exploded instead of the containment itself. The violence of the explosion and the response of the plant managers to flood ‘the reactor’ with sea water suggests the containment itself was damaged, perhaps seriously.

Tokyo declared small releases of radioactivity but are testing persons in the immediate area of the reactors.

The containment is a shell or vault of reinforced concrete walls a foot thick. There is an access door or lid that can be removed so that the reactor itself can be refueled and equipment replaced or serviced. The pressure vessel within the containment is a concrete- and forged steel pot like a pressure cooker that is also massively thick and strong. Ironically, many of the world’s pressure vessels are made by the Japan Steel Works, Ltd.

Immediately after the quake hit, the turbines of three reactors @ Fukushima Daiichi and two @ Fukushima Daini were shut down. (Three reactors @ Daiichi were out of service for maintenance.) The reactor computers automatically forced control rods into the reactor to quell the fission reactions. Heat still flowed though the condensers and heat exchanger loops but at a diminishing rate.

Even as the reactions slowed to a crawl the the fuel and water along with the pressure vessels and associated equipment were still intensely hot. A small amount of reactivity takes place inside any reactor after shut- down due to decay heat. The heat sink must remain functional so as to remove the remaining heat from the core and achieve ‘cold shut down’. This takes about 48 hours. The reactor operators rely on grid power to pump water needed to cool the core. Backing up the grid are diesel generators to run the pumps then batteries then a steam- powered pump that runs on the latent reactor heat.

There is a lot of plumbing and vulnerable heat- transfer equipment inside the containment. If this equipment fails there is no way to take heat out of the reactor core. In order to effectively shed heat some complete heat transfer mechanism must remain intact. That is, a way must remain to cause cooling water to flow through the core to a condenser or heat exchanger with sufficient cooling capacity to pull latent heat out of the core.

What has taken place in the two power stations @ five reactors is the earthquake- related failure of the heat- transfer infrastructure.

Grid power failed immediately, diesel generators failed after an hour and batteries died after four hours. The report last night was that a local fire department was pumping water into the reactor containment. Nothing was said about where this water went. No mention was made of the steam powered pumps failing but one or more obviously did.

With the failure to take heat from the core, cooling water turned to steam and boiled off. Without new water flowing into the reactor core some of the fuel became exposed. One consequence is the failure of control rods to quell core reactions. The reactor fuel gets hotter and the fuel rods warp and buckle. The fuel bundles themselves spontaneously catch on fire. This is why water boiling off in the pressure vessel is so dangerous. Exposed fuel rods collapse and fuel melts and falls to the bottom of the vessel. The control rods are destroyed or hang uselessly above the fuel.

The nuclear reaction and fierce heat caused the zirconium alloy fuel rod cladding to oxidize and produce hydrogen. The hydrogen was vented from the top of the pressure vessel into the containment either as the result by managers aiming to relieve pressure inside the vessel or as the consequence of a leak: open valves or broken heat transfer piping.

Hydrogen- and oxygen buildup within the containment structure along with steam caused the explosion which in turn is evidence that fuel in the reactor melted down.

The Time’s report fails to mention the heat sink or condenser. Water pumped into the core must flow elsewhere carrying heat with it. The only way to avoid a release of radioactive water is if the heat- transfer circuits are intact and electric power can be supplied to run the pumps to circulate cooling water through the core. This has obviously not taken place.

The operators are now flooding the remains of the confinement with sea water and boron in an attempt to cool the core.

If the vessel is closed the pressures will build inside it. The explosion indicates that pressures within the pressure vessel increased and had to be relieved. Steam and hydrogen flooded the containment. The explosion relieved the pressure. In a way, the explosion was part of heat transfer from the core.

Water flowing through an unpressurized core will dump into the containment. There is no other way: either the pressure vessel is open allowing cooling seawater to flow into the vessel and out again carrying heat (along with radioactivity) or the pressure vessel is closed and the core will continue to produce pressure which has to be vented, causing  perhaps a second explosion.

This coolant loss scenario is exactly what took place @ Three Mile Island in 1978. Water was pumped into the pressure vessel and allowed to flood the confinement through an open valve. Here are some differences between the current situation and TMI:

• The TMI containment was not breached. The containment had the capacity for thousands of gallons of radioactive water which was kept separate from the outside world in an auxiliary building. The Fukushima plant’s containment is possibly damaged and has unknown capacity for waste water. If the containment is damaged radioactive wastewater will seep outside.

• TMI’s high pressure cooling pumps were functioning, not broken by an earthquake.

• Replacement gear could be had at once from the surrounding area. TMI was not cut off by an earthquake and resulting tsunami.

• There was only one reactor at risk @ Three Mile Island, not five. (TMI #1 was shut down for maintenance in 1979.)

• The TMI reactor was not where contaminants can easily flow into the ocean. 

There has to be a flow to remove the latent heat from the core. The containment floor and the atmosphere are the heat sink. The outcome will be a release of radioactive material through the containent into the atmosphere and perhaps the sea.

It is hard to say which technical outcome will emerge. Multiply this times five and you can see that the Japanese are up against a massive set of largely self- inflicted difficulties.

• Nuclear power plants just became unaffordably expensive.
• Japan faces an existential crisis. Its prior embraces of modernity have ended badly and this looks to end worst of all. Small villages and densely industrialized commercial zones were equally damaged: small villages cost a farthing to rebuild compared to the massive expense of replacing refinery bits, industrial plants and the reactors. The industrial bits return ‘foreign exchange’, whatever that is. The price tag for this is a massive pollution event, the outcome of which is impossible to determine. When Establishment soothsayers insist that ‘another Chernobyl’ is unlikely, that outcome becomes the most probable.
• Japan’s economy has just failed. Even if the reactor crisis can be managed, the costs of replacing the lost capacity and decommissioning the five failed reactors look to exceed what the deflation- battered Japanese economy can bear. Add to this the massive costs to clean up and rebuild after the earthquake and tsunami damage.

This natural disaster is the latest in a series of  blows to the world- wide insurance industry. Modernity relies on a very minimum level of input/externality costs. Between protests, wars, oil input price hikes and the shrinkage of the skilled labor pool the input costs are being repriced with a vengeance. Everything ‘Made in Japan’ is going to get much more expensive. There is no choice since there is no other source of new money to the Japanese other than her customers. At the same time, the ability of the same customers to pay is diminishing. The earthquake and melt- downs do not add anything to purchasing power.

It’s just the costs are jumping.

UPDATE:  A second reactor @ the Fukushima power station has lost cooling.

UPDATE: Here is the Times with a bit more clarity about what exactly blew up this morning:

Government officials and executives of Tokyo Electric Power, which runs the plant, gave confusing accounts of the causes of the explosion and the damage it caused. Late Saturday night, officials said that the explosion occurred in a structure housing turbines near the No. 1 reactor at the plant rather than inside the reactor itself.

The blast, apparently caused by a sharp buildup of pressure or of hydrogen when the reactor’s cooling system failed after the quake, destroyed the concrete structure surrounding the reactor but did not collapse the critical steel container inside, they said. They said that raised the chances they could continue cooling the core, and prevent the release of large amounts of radioactive material and avoid a full core meltdown at the plant.

“We’ve confirmed that the reactor container was not damaged. The explosion didn’t occur inside the reactor container. As such there was no large amount of radiation leakage outside,” Japan’s chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said in a news conference on Saturday night. “At this point, there has been no major change to the level of radiation leakage outside, so we’d like everyone to respond calmly.”

If the containment was compromised, chances are cooling system plumbing was seriously damaged as well.

• The containment leaks so water carries radioactive material out of containment, into the ground or into the sea. Worse case scenario is a containment so damaged that radioactive water flows out of the reactor as fast as new water is pumped in.
• The superheated core is so hot it triggers a steam explosion. Presuming that seawater flooding has been ongoing, this outcome is seems less likely.
• The seawater cannot reach the core which triggers an explosion at some future point along with a further meltdown.

In any event, this reactor is destroyed and will require tens of billion$ to decommission it and to clean up the area. A major meltdown event will cost even more and may entail fatalities.

UPDATE: According to LA Times the cooling system of another reactor @ Kurushima Daiichi site has failed:

Another Japan nuclear reactor fails

A third reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 plant loses its emergency cooling capacity, bringing to six the number of reactors that have failed at the two Fukushima nuclear power plants since the earthquake and tsunami.

Another nuclear reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 facility in Japan has lost its emergency cooling capacity, according to the Associated Press, bringing to three the number of reactors at that facility to fall prey to Friday’s magnitude 8.9 earthquake and tsunami. Added to failure of three reactors at Fukushima No. 2, the count is now six overall.

So far, the only reactor that seems to pose an immediate risk of widespread danger is one of the two shut-down reactors at Fukushima No. 1, also known as Fukushima Daiichi, which was disabled by an explosion overnight that destroyed the building housing the reactor and the backup cooling system.

This article is unclear about how many reactors are in difficulty.

UPDATE:

The New York Times agrees there are three reactors suffering cooling system problems @ the Fukushima Daiichi station No. 1 and three more reactors @ Fukushima Daini station No. 2.

Meanwhile the NHK talking heads do not provide much comfort as they insist that sea water pumped into the core @ damaged reactor No. 1 and thence to the pressure vessel must stay in the pressure vessel. He suggests a core meltdown is not out of the question. This is because filling the pressure vessel with water does not remove heat from the core. Water must flow through the core until temperatures are low and reactivity ended.

The nightmare gets worse …